Actionable insights and inspiration for eCommerce merchants and marketers

Elevate your eCommerce game with expert tips, data insights, and inspiration from the best in the business. This blog is your resource for thriving in an omnichannel world, retaining more customers, and mastering the post-purchase experience.

Shippo's Reporting Isn't Enough. See AfterShip's Analytics

You're staring at your Shippo dashboard, looking at a list of shipments. You know the real story, the 'why' behind your rising shipping costs and delayed deliveries, is somewhere in that data. Shippo's reporting covers the label, the spend, and the carrier scan; what happens after the scan, from notification engagement to support-ticket volume to on-time performance against the date you promised the shopper, is where you hit the reporting ceiling. AfterShip Tracking analytics are built for that

Eugene Oh September 18, 2026

Shippo Lacks WMS? A Guide for Brands Needing Inventory Control

If you're manually reconciling inventory between your WMS and Shippo, you're not just wasting time; you're creating a system guaranteed to fail. Every stockout, every mis-shipment, every delayed order is a symptom of a disconnected tech stack. For scaling brands, this isn't a minor headache; it's a hard ceiling on growth. Stock stays in the WMS you already run, and the fix is to add AfterShip's post-purchase layer to it rather than replace the label tool you have. The Breaking Point: When Ship

Eugene Oh September 18, 2026

Shippo Can't Keep Up? The Verdict for High-Volume Sellers

You're shipping thousands of orders a day. Your team is combining same-customer orders by hand, maintaining a stack of routing rules, and stitching exports together at month end. You haven't failed; you've just outgrown your tools, and the next step is a shipping platform built for multichannel, multi-warehouse operations. That is a graduation moment: your success has made operational complexity your team's daily work, and the tool you chose when smaller sits at its center. When "Simple" Beco

Eugene Oh September 16, 2026

Best Premium Shipping Protection Providers Ranked for 2026

Your brand obsesses over every detail of its unboxing experience. So why, when a $300 order vanishes in transit, do you outsource the most critical customer touchpoint to a third-party claims site with its own branding? The problem is a broken customer promise, not a lost package. Premium protection is a customer-experience strategy that decides customer lifetime value (CLV), and this ranking of the best premium shipping protection providers judges each one on where the claim happens and who de

Michael Hsueh September 16, 2026

Recent articles

What is Address Validation? Does Postmen support it?

Postmen API does not support address validation for now as we are still focusing on integrating more carriers for label printing and rates calculation. In this post, I am going to tell you different options for address validation in the market that you can choose from. What is address validation? To be precise, address validation is also called address verification, address suggestion or address correction. In general, it refers to Street-level address validation which returns single or multipl

Teddy Chan December 17, 2015

Shipping labels 102 - paper size, label format and printer choices

Fulfillment Wednesday today will tell you how to setup your printer, and what label size and format you should choose when printing electronic shipping labels (i.e. online labels) with thermal printers and desktop printers. Label paper sizes & Printer Type In general there are** 2 different paper sizes** for shipping labels: Paper SizePrinter TypeCourier 4" x 6" Thermal printerUPS, DHL, FedEx, USPS, Royal Mail 8" x 11.5" (~A4)Laser or inkjet printerAll couriers Basically 4x6 paper size

Teddy Chan December 16, 2015

Shipping labels 101 - 3 ways to create shipping labels online

Fulfillment Wednesday yeah - it is my favorite day as I got to learn what matters for an online retailer shipping an order. Today I will go through different options of creating shipping labels online. What are shipping labels Shipping labels basically detail the delivery information like ship from, ship to, package description, dimension, weight, customs, billing info. Shipping labels are also called waybill or consignment note depending on the shipping company. Usually the courier has a sp

Teddy Chan December 09, 2015

Product Updates

English translation for China Post and China EMS tracking

It has been a while since we wrote about AfterShip features (sorry for being lazy on marketing ;). We now switch to ghost [https://ghost.org/] platform for our blog and hopefully forcing ourselves to write more. While we grow our team to now 23 people (in which 21 are developers), the team has been working hard to rewrite AfterShip API [https://www.aftership.com/] and upgrade to v5. We have learned a lot in the last 3 years and it is time to clean up the codes and make the system more scalable.

Teddy Chan November 30, 2015

What is manifest, end of day form, scan form?

Today is fulfillment wednesday, which I will go through issues, questions or topics we came across when shipping. Today's topic is manifest, which is also called end of day form or scan form for some carriers. What is manifest? Manifest is sort of a confirmation list of shipments that you're going to ship that day. In general, carriers require shippers to print out a manifest form at the end of the day and pass to the carrier - which carrier will verify the list of shipments. Some carriers a

Teddy Chan November 25, 2015

eCommerce Tips

How iHerb builds trust with international shoppers - shipping experience review on iHerb

Run an online store and ship domestically only to US, Canada or UK? Think twice after reading the following graph. While US and Canada are expected to see a strong growth of 14% and 16% annually, China, India and Mexico are enjoying a much ~faster~ crazier annual growth at 57%, 44% and 21% respectively according to Statista [http://www.statista.com/statistics/220177/b2c-e-commerce-sales-cagr-forecast-for-selected-countries/] . Are you ready for shipping internationally? In this article, I will

Teddy Chan September 25, 2014

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